"The joint work with from that research group, ' ..., is now seen as creating a new strand. The extant philosophy of science thought about s in relation to theory: models were ways of capturing the essence of a theory. What we were doing in that little research group – and what we did in the volume Models as Mediators – was to say, if you look at the way science is practised, you see that scientists treat models as autonomous objects on which they develop arguments. They manipulate them, argue with them, extend them. Models are not in a simple relationship between theory and the world, rather they are at angles to both, so you can use them to interrogate both sides. Models as Mediators is 20 years old, and you can definitely see now that the project as a whole changed the conversation in the philosophy of science about models. I don’t mean that everybody was convinced by it, but it created a big enough presence so that, even if you didn’t agree with it, you had to take it into account. This work was part of a wider move that has been happening toward ‘the philosophy of science in practice’."